FIU Center for Leadership outranks Ivy Leagues to nab top awards for programs

Leadership Excellence Essentials magazine, a publication of HR.com, named Florida International University’s Center for Leadership as the recipient of two prestigious LEAD2017 Awards. The announcement was made February 8, 2017, at the awards dinner of the annual two-day LEAD Conference held this year in Nashville, TN, with the full list of award recipients and rankings published in the February issue of the magazine.

The Center once again ranked among the top leaders in the fiercely-competitive Open Enrollment Programs category, grabbing the #2 spot this year. Only Carnegie Mellon University ranked higher. Programs from many prestigious universities rounded out the top 10 including Cornell University (#4), The Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania (#7), Vanderbilt University (#8), Stanford Continuing Studies (#9) and Harvard University (#10). These awards are presented to educational institutions with open enrollment programs with emphasis on leadership and organizational development.

Leadership Excellence selected The Center’s Miami-Dade County Public Schools (M-DCPS) Leadership Development Program as the best of all custom content programming. This annual year-long program, first launched in 2010 with the support of the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation, leverages leadership research as well as best practices from business practitioners for its design. In 2015-2016 alone, more than 160 M-DCPS professionals including principals, assistant principals, teacher leaders and administrators participated in a number of Center programs.

“The LEAD Awards showcase the world’s most effective leading-edge and esteemed leadership and training and development programs,” stated Debbie McGrath, CEO of HR.com and publisher of Leadership Excellence. She adds,

“The LEAD Awards are known as the Oscars of HR, celebrating organizations globally that have the best leadership development programs and applications.”

The 2017 LEAD Awards for The Center for Leadership were accepted by Dr. Nathan J. Hiller, Academic Director for the Center. Dr. Hiller also was one of the main keynote presenters at LEAD2017.

For over 30 years, Leadership Excellence has identified and recognized the Top 500 leadership organizations and their strategies and solutions in their annual ranking. Each year hundreds of education institutions and global business organizations apply to be ranked by Leadership Excellence. HR.com heavily weights rankings based on alumni feedback regarding the applicability and lasting impact of program content, and engages social media to garner a more objective rating of each institution applying to be ranked.

“The competition was formidable this year and that makes the achievement of two important awards all the more satisfying,” says Mayra Beers, Ph.D., Director for The Center and a Knight Research Fellow.

“Of course, many factors go into the rankings. But what pleases us the most is that our participants find great value from our programs, even long after attending a program.”